Acknowledgements

Everything I know about Internet Peering is the result of thousands of conversations with some very smart people in the peering coordinator community. All of these folks were exceedingly generous with their time and kind enough to share their wisdom with me over the past fifteen years. Of these people, I want to single out Avi Freedman, my first peering tour guide. He has always been encouraging and consistently very generous with his time and knowledge.

I will take a few pages here to provide credit where credit is due, to those people who have contributed to the creation of this book, to the drpeering.net website, and to the original research.

The Book. Thanks first to Brent Chapman, the first successful author I spoke with, for his encouragement and thoughtful advice over a CA Geek lunch. Thanks to Nigel Holland of the Right On Band for his never-ending encouragement (“Bill - you have to write this book.”). Thanks to Will Scott, Scott Landman, Mike Hughes, David Freedman, Tim Pozar, Cat Hoffman, Michael Barrow, and Jeff Turner for their thoughtful and in some cases, very detailed reviews. Thanks to Kyle Van Beveren for his playbook metaphors as a football quarterback and to Alan Hannan for his early feedback as well. A lot of folks have contributed ideas, including Mike Hughes (formerly LINX), Cat Hoffman (Equinix), Dave Meyer (Cisco), Craig Pierantozzi (Level 3), Jonathan Heiliger (Facebook), Raphael Ho (Equinix), Job Witteman (AMS-IX), Frank Orlowski (DE-CIX), Christian Nielsen (Microsoft), Andre Retief (MWEB), Edward Punt (KPN), Sven Engelhardt (TiNet), Frédéric Libotte (BNIX), Pierre Bruyère (BELNET), Jon Terreele (BELNET), James Blessing (LimeLight Networks), and Peter Harrison. Thanks especially to Bonnie E. Hupton for editing this book. She turned my manuscript into a much better book.

The DrPeering.net Site. I also want to thank those who provided ideas, suggestions, and feedback to the ever-evolving DrPeering.net web site. Frank Orlowski (DE-CIX) and I had our first conversations about writing an “Ask DrPeering” column at a GPF in the Dominican Republic. I wanted a web site for hosting the peering white papers. Combining these two, and the Dominican Republic Peering (DrPeering) idea was hatched. Thanks also to Chris Park (EasyNet), Randy Epstein, Richard Steenbergen (nLayer), Ren Provo (Comcast), and Joe Provo (ITA) for their suggestions about the site over the last few years.

The Original Peering White Papers. Most of all, thanks to all of the generous folks who have contributed their data points and their insights, citable or with anonymous attributions, during the fifteen years I spent in the peering world. All of the research in this book and in the white papers is based on these conversations in the field. All of this material has been rewritten and remains freely available on the http://DrPeering.net web site, a site sponsored by DE-CIX since the beginning.

Many contributors to the white paper research are listed in the following paragraphs. I would like to point out that not only have these people contributed to my research, but they are the ones who consistently volunteered their content, time, and promotion of the peering events that I ran at NANOGs, APRICOTs, Gigabit Peering Forums, etc. Without these contributions this book would not exist.

(The companies in the parenthesis represent the affiliation of the individuals at the time of the white paper walkthrough – many of these people have changed jobs, and in some cases have changed names as well.)

The Art of Peering: The IX Playbook: Chris Quesada (PAIX/Switch and Data), Josh Snowhorn (NAP of the Americas/Terremark), and Randy Whitney (UUNet).

I would also like to thank Elise Gerich, who, during my days at Merit Network, had faith that I could write the NANOG business plan and assume the role of chairing NANOG. I grew into that role, which after three years positioned me to take on the startup adventure with the title of Co-Founder and Chief Technical Liaison for Equinix. I spent 15 years researching peering with the NANOG community, so the release of this book can be traced back to that one step Elise took in 1995.

One final and very important thanks to Jay Adelson and Equinix. They allowed me the freedom to travel around the world to research, document, and evangelize peering. No easily identifiable revenue resulted from these activities, and they understood that the information I gathered for the peering community would be made freely available to customers and competitors alike. The whole industry benefited from this collection and dissemination of information on how peering works, and it required vision backed by a hefty bank account to allow me to do this research. Thanks for allowing me to help this community.